Patrick Bade
German Jazz: Collaboration and Resistance

Patrick Bade - German Jazz: Collaboration and Resistance

- American popular music that conquered the whole world in the interwar period was the creation of a symbiosis between the two races that the Nazis most hated, Jews of Ashkenazi origin and Blacks of African origin, and the connection is made very clearly in this hateful poster on left-hand side of a caricatured Afro American, wearing a star of David. Now as soon as this lecture is finished, I’m going to rush down to King’s Cross to catch a train up to the very heart of middle England, up to Rutland. ‘Cause tomorrow morning I’m actually giving a lecture on George Gershwin, and I’m going to begin that talk with these two images. If you follow news in the United Kingdom, you’ll know there’s been a lot of hysteria about refugees, people arriving in this country in boats. And so I want to remind my audience that jazz and popular music in America was the creation of two peoples who arrived in different ways in boats in America. You can see the poor Russian Jews, Orthodox Jews, in the hull of the ship on the left-hand side. And even more terrible, of course, the depiction of how the slaves were taken across in the hulls of ships in the 18th and early 19th century. So here are some of the leading creators of popular American music in the first half of the 20th century, George Gershwin, Irving Berlin. George Gershwin was the son of Jewish immigrants from St. Petersburg. There’s Irving Berlin who arrived in America as a five-year-old, also from Russia. And Jerome Kern, Richard Rogers, Benny Goodman, all descendants of Eastern European Jews. And jazz was born in the brothels of New Orleans in the beginning of the 20th century.

Top left is Jelly Roll Morton, a jazz pianist and composer who claimed to have invented jazz, though I think it was probably more than one person, took more than one person to create jazz. On the right, it is a look at the first American rag time hit that hit Europe just before the first World War in 1911, Irving Berlin, Alexander’s Ragtime Band. Of course, it’s a rather pale shadow of the real thing. Jazz. Two events enabled the spread of jazz out of the brothels of New Orleans into the rest of America. Firstly, that all the brothels were shut down in 1917 as part of the first World War war effort. And so there were lots of unemployed black musicians, who spread out into other cities, particularly to Chicago. And the other thing that happened the next, the following year, was prohibition. And that led to Speakeasys, and jazz became the music of Speakeasys. So jazz spread out from the speakeasys, became popular in America. And again, there were very fortuitous events and inventions. There was the introduction of commercial radio from 1922 and from 1925 there was electrical recording and the microphone. All these things help to spread jazz and American popular music, and of course the huge American film industry in Hollywood with these massive studios, and the introduction of sound from 1927 with 'The Jazz Singer’, with Al Jolson. So certainly by the ‘30s, pretty well the whole western world and beyond that was dancing to 'Le Rythme Americain’, American rhythm. American rhythm, to the chagrin of the Nazis, was the soundtrack of the Second World War. But to go back a little bit to Berlin in the ‘20s, in the Weimar period, from the mid '20s, Berlin really embraced this kind of music, jazz and Afro American culture.

This is the self-portrait of Otto Dix and you can see the jazz band in the background. So it became a syncopation, this act of enjoying two things that the Nazis most hated partly because of their association with the culture of Berlin. Berlin got its first taste of real jazz, not the Azak version, when a group called 'The Chocolate Kiddies’, for us rather offensive poster here, two of the musicians standing in front of it. And they arrived in Berlin in 1924, I think that was, with music of Duke Ellington. 1926, the famous ‘Revue Negre’ starring Josephine Baker, which had taken Paris by storm in 1925, and it did the same in Berlin the following year in 1926. And once again, of course, Josephine Baker became the huge star and the goddess, she was absolutely adored in Berlin as she was in Paris. In fact, the photograph on the right hand side was taken during her two month sojourn in Berlin. 1928, George Gershwin goes to Berlin and he pals up with the local cabaret composer, Mischa Spoliansky. They really got on like a house on fire and they played their compositions to one another. And Spoliansky probably was introduced to Spoliansky because the previous year Spoliansky had made the first complete recording of ‘Rhapsody in Blue’ without Gershwin himself playing. Ooh, something’s happened to my light here, seem to be in the dark, nevermind, I think you can still see me enough.

So Gershwin loved Spoliansky’s performance of his work. He of course had recorded it twice already, but he liked Spoliansky’s version so much that he bought two dozen copies to distribute to his friends in America. So I thought I’d start off by giving you a splash, the famous opening with the whaling clarinet. And then we’ll hear a few moments of Spoliansky playing ‘Rhapsody in Blue’ in this German recording. When the Nazis came to power in January, 1933, many in the Nazi hierarchy absolutely ranted and raved against jazz and popular American music. And there were many who wanted to ban it altogether. And there were intermittent and rather inconsistent bans. You can see here, “Swing tanzen verboten!” by order of the Reichskulturkammer. But Goebbels was too smart, he realised that this was probably not a good idea, they couldn’t really ban it all together. I find it wonderful, really, that swing was more powerful than Nazism. It’s one of those things that can give you a little bit of hope in life. But so, what the Germans, what the Nazis, I don’t want to say the Germans, what the Nazi hierarchy tried to do was to restrain it. ‘Cause jazz is the most unrestrained kind of music, it is an anarchic kind of music, it’s musical revolution. And they really didn’t want that but they could tolerate it in more homogenised form. So in 1937, the British band leader, Jack Hilton, here he is, went to Berlin. He performed there at the Scala Theatre and was well received. Once the war broke out, of course, thousands and well, millions, millions of young people were mobilised for the war effort. My guess is many of the people listening to me tonight were born because of that, because of this huge movement of people around the world. And my own parents met, as I’ve probably told you before, actually, in the British Armed forces in Palestine of all places.

So this is an illustration from a French pro-Nazi propaganda magazine during war, which is clearly attacking American culture. And as you can see, it says, “Americans learning to dance”, and it’s not a very flattering photograph. But that’s all anybody wanted to do. You know, people knew, especially the young men, that they could die very soon, they might not live to the end of the war. And they wanted to have a good time, they wanted to dance. I’m not quite sure where this is, I think that’s Britain, but we’ve got Germans, Brits, Americans, French, even Russians, although Stalin was also very disapproving of swing and American music. Even Russians wanted to dance to American rhythm. So I’m going to start off with probably the most successful German dance band in Germany itself during the Second World War. And this is, you see him here, a band he’d call 'Willy Berking’. And I think he got round the Nazis. He compromised and he produced the, kind of, rather more restrained, more homogenised kind of jazz band sound that the Nazis were prepared to tolerate. So this is Willy Berking. There were other band leaders who were prepared to be bolder, take risks, but they were constantly playing a kind of cat and mouse game with the Nazi authorities. This is the Willi Stanke band. And this is a record that was brought out in 1942, but had to be immediately withdrawn because it was really too much. It was too raw, too animalistic, too dangerous as far as the Nazis were concerned.

If Jazz’s players wanted to go further in that and really approach something closer to proper American jazz, they were really at risk and they had to go clandestine. For one thing, if you wanted to keep up with the latest American trends in jazz that involved listening to foreign radio broadcast, which could get you sent to a concentration camp. Or smuggling American records, which was done through neutral countries and sometimes through occupied countries. And there were bands that played and recorded clandestinely. And I’m going to play you a recording that was not a commercial, not an open recording. This is by the so-called ‘Hot Club of Frankfurt’. The image on the screen shows you what Frankfurt looked like by the end of the war. But these are musicians who are expressing, I suppose, their defiance of the regime by playing this kind of music hidden in cellars. Some of the most celebrated and loved jazz musicians of the Second World War period were Belgian. Brussels was very important. A Belgian band leader, was a man called Fud Candrix, and his band toured all over occupied Europe and in the Reich itself, very popular everywhere they went. I’m going to play you a very strange recording made in Berlin in 1942 with the Fud Candrix band. And it’s a very accomplished American big band sound. What is weird is when the singer comes in, it’s such a mismatch. The singer seems to be really at odds with the rest of the band. He seems to have wandered in from an operetta by Lehár, something very Viennese sounding. Fud Candrix had the freedom to go around Europe, occupied Europe, that is of course.

And he also went to Paris where he had the good fortune to perform, I think, with a rather more congenial performer than the singer we just heard, and that is the great Django Reinhardt. He is usually considered to be the greatest jazz musician produced on this side of the Atlantic, that’s in the European side of the Atlantic, up to including the Second World War. Fascinating man, amazing story. He was of gypsy and Jewish background, so very much endangered. It’s rather mysterious, when war broke out, he was actually in London with the Hot Club of France and his great violinist partner, Stéphane Grappelli, Grappelli decided to stay in Britain for the duration of the war. And Reinhardt went back to France and was extremely lucky to survive. He was arrested at one point, but he was apparently saved by a jazz loving Nazi officer. So I’ll play you a slightly longer excerpt this time, so that we get into the fabulous solo that he’s given in this piece, conducted by Fud Candrix. Throughout the German Reich and particularly in occupied Europe, jazz became a means of defiance and it became a symbol of hope. Young people took to it, particularly in France. There were young people who call themselves ‘Zazous’ and they adopted a very distinctive dress code, as you can see here, the young men had long hair for the period, and I dunno quite why umbrellas were part of their get up, but they wore these baggy long clothes, the men. And so to do that was to show your contempt and your defiance for the values of Vichy France and the Germans.

This was a risky thing to do. If you went out on the streets, got up like this, Nazis or Vichy Milice could beat you up or even imprison you. But this is a song from towards the end of the war, beginning of 1944, a song about the ‘Zazous’. Now, Goebbels understood that he could not suppress jazz and swing altogether. So he thought, well, let’s make use of it. And even if they didn’t really want it on German radio, they were very happy to use it for propaganda purposes for broadcast to allied countries, particularly to Britain. So one of the best jazz bands in Europe was formed for this purpose under a musician called Lutz Templin, who you see painted on the right hand side. The musicians for this band were handpicked from all over Europe. They were Dutch, they were Italian, some were people who were at risk from the Germans because they were half Jewish or had backgrounds that for the Nazis were ‘unerwünscht’, unwanted. So I’m sure that they were very happy to be out of danger, to be able to do what they loved doing, which was playing jazz. And they didn’t really worry too much about the propaganda content of the pieces that they were playing. And who’s to blame them, who would do otherwise really if the choice was that or going to the eastern front or going to a concentration camp? And they had a singer who called himself Charlie, who you see on the left-hand side, who spoke passable English, not probably quite as good as he thought it was. And he apparently made the texts that were based on popular American songs. And so the first one I’m going to play you, it’s the familiar ‘You’re Driving Me Crazy’. And he sings the first verse as it is in this song, and he introduces spoken text attacking Churchill and accusing him of schmoozing with the Jews and saying that these are bad friends to have and he’ll be betrayed by them.

SONG BEGINS

♪ Yes you, you’re driving me crazy ♪ ♪ What did I do? ♪ ♪ What did I do? ♪ ♪ My tears for you make everything hazy ♪ ♪ Clouding the skies of blue ♪ ♪ When I needed you ♪ ♪ Yes you, you’re driving me crazy ♪ ♪ What did I do to you? ♪ ♪ Here is Winston Churchill’s latest tearjerker ♪ ♪ Yes, the Germans are driving me crazy ♪ ♪ I thought I had brains, but they shattered my planes ♪ ♪ The Jews are the friends who are near me to cheer me, ♪ ♪ Believe me they do ♪ ♪ But Jews are the kind that will hurt me ♪ I dunno what they were going to achieve with these things because it really, in a way the humour is so clutzy and clumsy that if you laugh, you laugh not quite in the way that they intended. So here’s another one, this is Saint Louis Blues. And this is a song where the words are gloating over the bombing of London during the blitz of 1940 to 41. ♪ A negro from the London Docks ♪ ♪ Sings the blackout blues ♪ ♪ I hate to see the evening sun go down ♪ ♪ Hate to see the evening sun go down ♪ ♪ ‘Cause the German he done bomb this town ♪ ♪ Feelin’ tomorrow ♪ ♪ I pack my train and make my getaway ♪ ♪ That Churchill badman, with his wars and things ♪ ♪ Pulls pork round by his apron strings ♪ ♪ One for Churchill and his bloody war ♪ ♪ I wouldn’t feel as so doggone sore! ♪ One last one here. I don’t imagine anybody’s, it’s all a bit, as somebody said last week, it’s all a bit Mel Brooks this. But this last song is gloating over the impending loss of the British Empire. ♪ Here’s Mr. Churchill’s latest song ♪ ♪ Dedicated to Great Britain ♪ ♪ I never cared for you before ♪ ♪ Hong Kong, Burma, Singapore ♪ ♪ Bye, bye, empire ♪ ♪ India I may lose too ♪ ♪ Then I’ll only have the London Zoo ♪ ♪ Bye, bye, empire ♪ ♪ There’s no one here who loves and understands me ♪ ♪ Nothing but heaps of bad news they all hand me ♪ ♪ The Yankees are still out of sight ♪ ♪ I can’t make out wrong from right ♪ ♪ Empire, bye, bye ♪

SONG ENDS

I suppose that was Britain’s darkest moment because as he says, at that point the Americans were still “out of sight”. So that’s before December, 1941, when it was just the British fighting against the Axis. So swing and jazz, an American popular style, was absolutely everywhere. And it was even in the concentration camps. On the screen we have the most popular Dutch swing singers, Johnny and Jones. They were both of Jewish origin and very, very popular in the years immediately before the war. And they were, once the Germans invaded, they were rounded up and they were sent to the transit camp of Westerbork and they performed there. And then they were sent on to Theresienstadt and they took part in concerts in Theresienstadt. From there, right at the end of the war, they were transported to Auschwitz. They didn’t die in Auschwitz. They then went to Sachsenhausen and finally to Bergen-Belsen where both of them died of exhaustion. Johnny tragically died on the 15th of April, 1944, the very day that Bergen-Belsen was liberated by the British. If you go onto YouTube, you can hear a very poignant song. I don’t have it, I didn’t have it to play for you. They were released strangely for a day from Westerbork and they went into Amsterdam and they recorded a song which they called ‘The Westerbork Serenade’. But I’m going to play you a record they made in 1940, just after the German invasion.

SONG BEGINS

♪ The flatter the plate, the fewer the soup ♪ ♪ The fewer the soup, the shorter the spoon ♪ ♪ The shorter the spoon, the less you eat ♪ ♪ Then the less you eat, then the thinner you get ♪ ♪ Now the golds do all the work ♪ ♪ But the reds get all the gravy ♪ ♪ The thinner you get, the worser you feel ♪ ♪ The worser you feel, the longer your face ♪ ♪ The longer your face, the sadder you look ♪ ♪ When you look sad, your appetite’s bad ♪ ♪ Now the golds do all the work ♪ ♪ But the reds get all the gravy ♪ ♪ Monday you’re in a daze ♪ ♪ But Sunday you can speak ♪ ♪ But you find that seven days ♪ ♪ Even makes one week ♪ ♪ The statue sings ♪ ♪ The window is smashed ♪ ♪ You go for the cops, you go to the coop ♪ ♪ The flatter the plate, then the fewer the soup ♪ ♪ Now the golds do all the work ♪ ♪ But the reds get all the gravy ♪

SONG ENDS

There’s the so-called ghetto swingers group that was formed and performed in the Theresienstadt concentration camp. And the man on the right wearing a Yellow Star was a distinguished jazz pianist called Martin Roman, who was actually on, I mean, it’s so awful and sort of poignant that Johnny and Jones were on the absolute last train from Westerbork to Auschwitz and Martin Roman was on the last train from Theresienstadt to Auschwitz along with Kurt Gerron, Kurt Gerron of course died. And amazingly, Martin Roman actually survived. Now, as I said, people were secretly radio sets. And I was talking last time about which pieces of music are the song, the piece of music, that evokes the war in different countries. In Germany it’s , in England it’s ‘We Will Meet Again’. And for the Americans, it might be ‘In The Mood’ or it might be ‘Moonlight Serenade’. And in any case, it’s certainly going to be Glen Miller. And so many bands around Europe took up Glen Miller’s music and imitated his big band sound. So I’m going to play you, there are, well, there are two French versions I could play you. There’s a Ray Ventura one, but I’m going to play you the Alix Combelle. So this is ‘Dans L'ambiance’, ‘In The Mood’ in French recording made during the war. I would say that is quite an effective idiomatic version of the American big band sound with the soloist taking over at different points. What is amazing is that that piece was so popular that it was even played by a German band from the radio station in Belgrade. When the Germans invaded Yugoslavia they took over the the radio station and they started to, this was the time, of course, of Rommel in North Africa. And they were broadcasting particularly to German troops in North Africa.

And so when they went through the archives of Radio Belgrade, they threw out everything that was “unerwünscht”, naturally everything that was by a Jewish composer or a Jewish musician, or was displeasing in one way or another to the Nazis. And they found they had very little left. So they sent an urgent request to the radio station in Vienna. Vienna sent some records including ‘Lili Marlene’, the original version of ‘Lili Marlene’. And this became an unexpected huge international hit. And as you know, even crossed enemy lines and was taken up by the British, in particular the Americans. And on the right hand side, you can see this is a photograph of fan mail for Lili Marlene arriving in Radio Belgrade headquarters. But I’m going to play you a very weird version of ‘In The Mood’ by a jazz band that was formed at this radio station, which is really terrible. What can I say? This is really pure Mel Brooks. What you can say is these Nazi soldiers ain’t got rhythm.

You couldn’t really imagine a copied more version. And Glen Miller, of course, was inducted into the American military and he was sadly, as you know, he was on a flight that mysteriously disappeared over the channel right at the end of the war. We don’t really know what happened. But he was a powerful weapon of propaganda for the Americans ‘cause people loved his music so much and he had a regular radio hour that was the opposite of the German propaganda that I’ve just played you. But it was intended, towards the end of the war, to win over German soldiers. And it really worked. Actually, enormous numbers of German soldiers were very keen to surrender to the Americans rather than to the Russians. And certainly Glen Miller and his music helped to create the impression that you were going to get a gentler reception from the Americans than you were from the Russians. I’m going to finish with Glen Miller being introduced in his radio programme aimed at the German troops. And let’s see what you’ve got to say.

Q&A and Comments:

Yes, haircut yesterday.

The second rhapsody for piano was arranged for two pianos. Great piece, I’m talking about Gershwin, as I said, tomorrow.

Q: Would you say Nazi’s restrained swing sounded like upbeat movie music?

A: Yes, possibly. Possibly, you could say that. Yes. I mean, it’s attractive enough, isn’t it? It just wasn’t, they didn’t want to frighten the horses with it. Maybe the feeling that trends are moving in the . Yes. Made it too close to the Nazi agendas.

Well that’s an interesting idea. Schwarzer Panther is actually Tiger Rag, yes. German bands, okay. Except for the usual terrible European and Brits, I’m not sure you want to say with that. Swing Kids is a wonderful short film showing the defiance of young people to enjoy jazz and dance at great cost. Yes, I’ve not seen it. I remember it got good reviews when it came out.

Q: Have you heard 'Zu Asche, zu Staub’ in episode two of ‘Babylon Berlin’?

A: No, I haven’t. I need to look up that. Music seems very tame compared to what came later. Although I think you can, you know, this youth rebellion of the French was an interesting premonition of what happened after the war.

This is Dennis, I can remember a classic cartoon in the New Yorker at the time when the Soviets were claiming to have invented and discovered everything from penicillin to transistors. The cartoon showed at class with the lecturer saying, “Today we study how jazz came up from the don from Rostov.”

Interesting, yes. But of course, as I said, it was quite in Russia as it was in Germany. Noticed that one of your pieces recorded in Germany after the US was the war on the Columbia label. That was an American company, yeah. Zoot suits, yes, there’ll be an equivalent in America. Why would the Nazis want the Dutch of Jewish origin singers to play in the cor- Well, the story of the orchestra, I have the great privilege on Saturday, I’m going to have lunch with Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, she played the cello in the women’s orchestra in Auschwitz. You could ask that question. And of course all the very rich cultural life that went on in Theresienstadt.

Sidney Bechet. Yes, he was certainly known in Germany too ‘cause he was a big star in Paris before the war and then again later. What happened to the Nazi sympathising jazz artists? Yes, well, Charlie of Charlie’s band, he disappeared after the war and then emigrated to America and had a perfectly happy life in America after the war with nobody really knowing his history. Some of the more prominent musicians, Dutch and Belgian ones, were briefly banned from performing after the war. But I think, you know, eventually everybody was forgiven.

I won’t be invited to a rock and roll band. Well, I’m quite happy about that. I wouldn’t miss it.

Mel Brooks. Well, I think, you know, he doesn’t need to listen to anybody else really, he’s so great. The US still kept a colour bar during war. That’s very, very true. But there were people who, I mean, Josephine Baker, of course, was a fighter against that and refused to, there were people who actually refused to perform in front of segregated American military audiences.

Q: Did German jazz musicians play in this country?

A: When you say this country, do you mean America? I very much doubt it. That would be the case.

Thank you, Erica. Glen Miller was in the pit band for 'Girl Crazy’ on Broadway, along with Benny Goodman, Red Nichols and Gene Krupa. Gershwin lettered at the opening. Those were the days and there were a lot of talented people around.

Anyway, thank you very, very much. A little gap because after tomorrow’s lecture in Rutland, I’m off, well, and after lunch with Anita, I’m off to Milan at the weekend, so I’ll be away for a few days and will talk to you in about 10 days time.